June 11, 2008

Cinzia, one of the instructors for the Remixing El Presidio project, has created some incredible geospatial mash-ups with Google Earth and Sketchup. First, Sal’s 1792 plan of the Presidio with the 1812 extension of the main quadrangle overlay in yellow:

My favorite is the 3D model she created with sketchup:

You can adjust things like the time of day to check out the color variations and the shadows:

If you want to check it out for yourself, just download this folder and open the files in Google Earth!

June 9, 2008

Please join us on Friday, June 13th at 11:00AM for an open house at the El Presidio of San Francisco. We will demonstrate the digital interpretive trail created by the University of California, Berkeley class, Digital Documentation and Representation in Archaeology. We will be walking around the footprint of the 1790 fort and visiting El Polin Springs, home of the famous Juana Briones. Come and experience San Francisco history at this unique technological event.

When: 11:00 AM

Where: The Officers’ Club at the San Francisco Presidio, 50 Moraga Avenue

The idea of this field-school has developed as a result of both the design charrette held in August 2007 by the archaeologists of the Presidio Trust to plan their research and public programs of the El Presidio (Spanish and Mexican) fort and the Presidio Trusts new plan for the Main Post including the Anza Esplanade. Ruth Tringham is a consultant on this project. In addition the UCB Dept of Anthropology is currently administering and sponsoring a large private grant (Shaw Foundation), which includes funding for the new Coordinator of Public Programs for the El Presidio (Levantar) project at the SF Presidio.

The course is on “New Media and Cultural Heritage” and focuses on the real world challenge of creating interpretive walks and other installations for the public that involve wireless technology, digital geomapping, storytelling etc, globally and, specifically, at the El Presidio fort and the de Anza trail (the Levantar Project), which is the current focus of research of the Archaeology Group at the SF Presidio. The course involves the design, field trial, and documentation of these different formats of representation of cultural heritage places. The aim is to seek alternatives to permanent markers of information about places, leveraging different forms of digital media. The course takes advantage of the many specialists in these technologies in the Bay Area with whom we have contact and who have offered to contribute their help to the course (CyArk, Cultural Heritage Imaging and others). It will also build on our own research in the Remediated Places project at Catalhöyük and the SF Presidio.

The Presidio Archaeology Lab created an amazing GIS overlay of Sal’s 1792 plan of the original San Francisco Presidio, triangulating the position from excavations performed by the many field schools over the years. Using the GIS overlay as a guide, I recreated the footprint of the 1792 Presidio Quad as a Memory Map in Flickr, accessible by mobile phones and geospatially located. This is a small part of a larger project of interpretation trails at the San Francisco Presidio, and it factors heavily into my dissertation on emplaced archaeological interpretation. Here’s a step-by-step guide to creating your own enhanced landscape.

1) Take a screenshot of the area you’d like to annotate. On Macs you can do this by typing command-shift-3.

2) Edit this image down to the desired size/location. I usually use photoshop and correct the satellite image for color.

3) Upload this image to Flickr. You can also use google earth for this same effect, but as of yet, you cannot access google earth from cellphones.

4) Add notes to the photo using Flickr’s toolbar. When someone moves their mouse over the photo, then the notes appear. This also works with touch-screen cell phones such as the iphone. Unfortunately you can only add rectangles, but that should work for Americanist archaeology, at least! You can also add links to other images inside of the note.

5) Add the photo to Flickr’s map. This gives you a (very) rough lat/long that will allow other people to locate your interpreted data.

6) Embed your photo into your blog/website with Mbedr. Unfortunately I’ve been having problems with this on wordpress–for an example, check out this post on livejournal. Using Mbedr preserves your flickr notes outside of flickr.

7) You should now be able to access the image on your cellphone, with the notes intact. This also works on the One Laptop Per Child laptops, which delights me to no end.

June 1, 2008

I have been thinking about the plazas of the El Presidio Spanish Colonial Quadrangles. When we think of the quadrangles, we almost always think about the built environment that creates the perimeters of the Quadrangles. It’s easier for us to imagine, perhaps, the buildings with their challenges of building materials, builders with the necessary skills, the forces of entropy that want to destroy the buildings, the bustle of activity that went into building them and then into living in them or moving around them. In England, the public squares that were built in the 17th century have always focused in people’s minds on the built environment of the perimeter rather than the square as a whole. In fact, Covent Garden that was a public square designed by the famous architectInigo Jones deliberately copied the arcaded shaded perimeter of Spanish and Italian plazas and piazzas, focusing attention – because of the shops within the arcades – on the perimeter. And here are we at the Presidio continuing this traditional perception.

When we think about the interior of the quadrangles, what do we envisage? I believe that, if visitors think about the interior of the Quadrangle at all, they think of a void, at best an empty place that needs to be passed through quickly. Currently, the interior of all three phases of the Colonial El Presidio quadrangle is covered by an asphalted car park. The archaeologists do not expect any features to turn up in geophysical survey. The anomalies that were recognized in the middle of the 1815 quadrangle are in fact most likely to be vestiges of the northern perimeter of thesecond (1780-1815) Quadrangle. In some Presidios (eg Santa Barbara) the built environment did encroach into the plaza area (Voss, 2008, xx), but not at San Francisco’s Presidio.

So we have this huge empty space – a void – and yet it’s the largest part of the built environment of El Presidio in all periods of its history, even if itself it is not built, but enclosed. And in fact the area became larger and larger. Barbara Voss has a nice illustration of this (Voss, 2008, xx). The 1815 plaza, for example, represents an increase of 220% of the previous phase. There seems to me, then,a surprising dearth of the literature devoted to what went on in this very large place.

A general knowledge of history and geography of Mediterranean cities (Italy, Greece, Spain, Portugal, Dalmatia)and their colonial outposts in the Americas, suggests a number of ways in which the plaza interior was in fact the center of event-centered community-building and social daily life. This suggests a very different pattern of movement, sound, and visual impressions from the empty images that we tend to be presented with. The plaza of Madrid, for example, knew bull-fights, executions, military parades, religious festivals. The great circular plaza of Siena is famous for its annual horse-racing, but this piazza along with every small and large town piazza and plaza is still to this day the location of the corso or its equivalent where the community struts and chats walking slowly around or stopping to gather every evening as the sun goes down.

Barbara Voss interprets the fact that the Quadrangle that was constructed in 1815was the first time that all fours sides of the perimeter were built finally closing in the plaza does not represent the colonists finally bowing to the rules of the Spanish crown. Quite the contrary – this represents a strengthening of thecommunity building activities of the Californios and their symbolic and actual separation from the Native Americans on whose labor they depended. It represents a turning inwards of attention on themselves.

Just as the Quadrangle is more about demarcating its residents from the outside world, (rather than defending it from aggressors), the plaza itself represents the center of this inward looking activity and attention. The plaza is not just about military mustering, training and drilling, it is about audio-visual visibility and control of movement. As Barbara Voss says, the construction of the 1815 Quadrangle represents an important shift in the ethnogenesis of the Californios and the Californianas, in their self-awareness as an ethnicity, in their performance ofactions and behaviors that set them apart. Thus the plaza is larger in this construction, not to enable more soldiers to drill, but to make sure that the whole population could participate at once, to have grander events (perhaps even bullfights and horse-races).

We need to think what difference it makes if you have a more enclosed plaza like the one built in 1815, in contrast with a more permeable construction such as those of the first and second Quadrangles, when the fourth (eastern) side of the perimeter was absent or hardly present.

Some of the things a plaza formatcreates, as has been known from at least the earliest Classical cities of Greece (plaka) and Rome (forums), emulated in the cities of the Renaissance:

The old panopticon theme: from anywhere in the perimeter, you can keep and eye (and ear) on every other part.

Every part of the perimeter is accessible (at least its front parts) by movement along a straight path

All parts of the perimeter are brought together at a central point in the plaza.

The perimeter creates shelter for the plaza from the wind and sun

Protection for animals and people from themselves (wandering). As Voss points out, it is easy to keep an eye on everyone from anywhere.

It draws in the eye and movement into the center: good for gathering, speeches, activities, centering the attention, avoiding distractions.

And of course movement control of many by a few!

More later So how would we break this down into a few multimedia vignettes.

May 27, 2008

The first day at the Presidio was a success! We managed to tour around the main post, introduce the class, then make memory maps. For the uninitiated, these memory maps are google maps screenshots annotated on flickr with personal, geolocated stories.

Click on the images to check out more stories.

Tomorrow we’ll be going over GPS data and having a big seminar from the maker of Sophie. Now I have to drive to Safeway to buy dinner for tomorrow!

May 24, 2008

Welcome to the Remixing El Presidio blog. We will be updating this blog with news from our class at the San Francisco Presidio. Here is the class description:

The idea of this field-school has developed as a result of both the design charrette held in August 2007 by the archaeologists of the Presidio Trust to plan their research and public programs of the El Presidio (Spanish and Mexican) fort and the Presidio Trusts new plan for the Main Post including the Anza Esplanade. Ruth Tringham is a consultant on this project. In addition the UCB Dept of Anthropology is currently administering and sponsoring a large private grant (Shaw Foundation), which includes funding for the new Coordinator of Public Programs for the El Presidio (Levantar) project at the SF Presidio.

The course will be on “New Media and Cultural Heritage” and will focus on the real world challenge of creating interpretive walks and other installations for the public that involve wireless technology, digital geomapping, storytelling etc, globally and, specifically, at the El Presidio fort and the de Anza trail (the Levantar Project), which is the current focus of research of the Archaeology Group at the SF Presidio. The course will involve the design, field trial, and documentation of these different formats of representation of cultural heritage places. The aim is to seek alternatives to permanent markers of information about places, leveraging different forms of digital media. The course will take advantage of the many specialists in these technologies in the Bay Area with whom we have contact and who have offered to contribute their help to the course (CyArk, Cultural Heritage Imaging and others). It will also build on our own research in the Remediated Places project at Catalhöyük and the SF Presidio.